There’s apparently something in the water in Central America that inspires their tourism boards to latch onto silly and meaningless slogans like a birdwatcher reaching for binoculars. The latest one to earn guffaws and ridicule is Panama’s, which is a year old but just got pilloried by this Jaunted post: Panama Picks A Tourism Slogan Reminiscent Of Childhood Trauma, STDs.

What is this inspired tourism slogan? “Panama – It Will Never Leave You.”

Could it be any worse? Panama watchers are having a heyday with this one, wondering whether it refers to malaria, dengue fever, stalkers, or something picked up from a prostitute. That’s one way to get honest feedback I guess. Just put out your new slogan and see how many people make fun of it on blogs and twitter. (If nobody does, it probably means your slogan is just boring, since few of these things seem to actually move the needle in terms of visitors anyway. But better to be boring than a laughing stock.)

Back in 2006, Guatemala launched the focus-group-inspired slogan “Soul of the Earth” and they’ve stuck with it ever since. WTF?! I don’t even know what that is supposed to mean, much less how it applies to Guatemala and not any of its neighbors. Will there be shamans and chanting involved? Or spelunking? Will I feel the ground vibrate during the summer solstice?

Honduras appears to have used three slogans in as many years. I’ve got a hat a local tourism person gave me with the Spanish version of their slogan “One small country, three big worlds.” I put this into an article I wrote for another publication after I returned from there because I thought it nicely summed up the answer to the inevitable question, “Why go there?” You go because you’ve got a great Maya ruins site, nature preserves, and the coral-fringed islands. So the slogan actually means something.

Alas, I then got a wrist slapping from a PR and advertising agency person who had worked with me setting up part of my research there. Apparently her agency had spent tons of money on focus groups and reports to come up with a brand new slogan: “The Central America you know — the country you’ll love.”

Again, are you kidding me? You could slap that same tag line onto Costa Rica, Guatemala, or Panama and nobody would know the difference. That slogan is still up on the agency-built website, but there was yet another one in between those two for a brief time: “It’s All Here In Honduras.” Apparently it wasn’t all there after all. But now Honduras really is looking like “the Central America you know,” coup d’etats and all.

El Salvador and Nicaragua both go for a one-word slogan. Nicaragua’s is simply, “Unique.” El Salvador went for “Impressive!” Well, the waves are impressively grarly in El Salvador I guess and Nicaragua is unique in being the poorest mainland country in the Americas, but neither slogan does much to sell the destination or paint a picture of why anyone should visit. How about just saying, “We’re generic”? Or “You’ll probably have a good time if you come here on vacation.” Pretty much the same thing.

Belize has “Mother Nature’s best-kept secret.” Maybe Mother Nature’s best-kept secret is that the soul of the Earth is actually in Guatemala. And Belize isn’t exactly a secret anymore. But really, at least that one at least doesn’t leave you scratching your head.

So are there any Central American destination slogans that really work? Yes one, and it’s no coincidence that it’s from the country that gets the most tourists by far.

“Costa Rica: no artificial ingredients.”

Nicely played Ticos.

Casa Palopo, Guatemala (Photo Al Argueta)

Marketing guru and all-around smart guy Seth Godin has a great concise post on his blog about “luxury” vs. “premium.”

Luxury goods are needlessly expensive. By needlessly, I mean that the price is not related to performance. The price is related to scarcity, brand and storytelling.

Premium goods, on the other hand, are expensive variants of commodity goods. Pay more, get more.

We decided to call our site “Luxury Latin America” because it conveys the right feeling and it’s easy to understand in different cultures and contexts. Premium just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Sounds like something from a gas station.

But we talk a lot more about value in our honest hotel and tour reviews because we refuse to believe that luxury implies “overpriced.” In some cases yes, and we’ll say so, but in many other cases the guests would say the experience was worth every penny. Plus a hotel may be a commodity at the business chain level and many tours of Costa Rica or Patagonia could be considered commodities since they are so similar, this is certainly not the case at the true 5-star level.

So that’s why we leave out many hotels that Travel + Leisure would go all ga-ga over because we don’t have to care how it looks in a fold-out photo spread. We care more about how you’ll be treated by the staff and whether the amenities will exceed your expectations. Part of the reason we focus on Latin America is because overall, the hotels and tours are a great value, even at the very top end. When it is clear to us that guests feel like they are being ripped off, we’ll either leave that option out or—when it’s a prominent hotel that needs to be in here—we’ll note that the rates don’t necessarily reflect what you get for your money.

Some of the Brazil luxury hotel reviews we just posted fit into the latter case. Many would say the Sanctuary Lodge at Machu Picchu does as well. Overall though, in each feature story or review we try to answer the question, “Will you get your money’s worth by booking with this company?” We’re not about the travel equivalent of a $50,000 handbag. We’re the travel equivalent of the custom-made suit.

According to The Telegraph newspaper, the swine flu attitude in Cancun seems to be ignore it and it will go away.

Have you ever wanted to fly in a private jet, but find that it’s a little out of your league? You can stay in this bizarre Costa Rican hotel suite instead, one that is half bungalow, half airplane.

A HotelChatter writer found little that was cool about Five Cool Rooms in Buenos Aires. Read the review to see the problem we have with most hip boutique hotels in Buenos Aires: small rooms, bad service, and rates that are way out of line for what you get. (The writer wanted to stay at Home, which we can vouch has an excellent restaurant.)

We’ve been hearing about this swanky Uxua Casa Hotel in the Bahia region of Brazil since before Luxury Latin America went live two years ago, but apparently it is open for real now. It’s on our list to get to at some point as our Brazil section will start up next week.

There’s a lot going on outside of what we cover in detail here, so today we’ll take a step back and look at the travel and real estate news for Latin America.

- Argentina seems to have backpedaled on its unpopular decision to start soaking North American and British visitors an extra $130 or more for the pleasure of spending their money in the cash-strapped country. For the moment anyway, no announcements or collections have taken place. It looks like they have figured out that travel will nosedive when word gets out, especially for families.

- Costa Rica has added a new property tax on houses and condominiums valued at more than $180,800 according to International Living. It’s either a Robin Hood play or a contribution to a good cause depending on how you look at it, with the money going to build affordable housing for locals currently living in shantytowns. Either way, it’s probably not going to impact whether you buy there or not: at a rate of .25% up to $1.36 million, the tax on a $500,000 condo would be $1,250 per year. Still that is far higher than any other country in the region and Costa Rica already has some of the most expensive coastal real estate between Los Cabos and the bottom of South America.

- The always buzz-worthy Francis Ford Coppola has opened another lodging property, this time in Argentina. We won’t be reviewing it since it’s more a rental villa than a hotel, but Jardin Escondido is in the artsy Palermo Soho neighborhood of Buenos Aires. It’s a three-level townhouse that can sleep 13, with a large pool courtyard.

- Conde Nast Traveler just put out its 2009 Hot List for hotels. The Latin American coverage is pretty skimpy, but that’s okay. We’ll continue to bring you detailed reviews of consistently great hotels rather than the trendy flavors of the moment. They did touch on a few we’ve reviewed already though in Luxury Latin America, including Casitas del Colca (Peru), Inkaterra La Casona (Peru), and St. Regis Punta Mita (Mexico).

Can you trust the hotel reviews on TripAdvisor or other “user-generated content” sites?

Since I’m a travel editor, people are always telling me about their own vacation experiences, about resorts that went above the call of duty and hotels that failed miserably. At least once a month, someone will bring up how they were duped by the reviews on TripAdvisor or, even more worrisome, they’ll tell me about a hotel manager who pushed them to post a good review. In one case (a competitor to a hotel we’ve reviewed here), the manager offered to comp the dinner tab if the couple would post something online before they checked out. It’s a sly—and inexpensive—marketing move to be sure, but it makes you wonder how many glowing reviews got there by some mutual back-scratching. It’s a problem that TripAdvisor can never truly police or prevent.

Then there are the fake reviews written directly by the people who work at the hotel, or their PR agency people, like this one called out by HotelChatter. Or this one. Hint: when the words used in the review and the same ones on the hotels’ website, something’s fishy…

The real problem with this system though, is that you have no idea of the tastes or traveling experiences of the people writing the reviews. Some are accustomed to staying at Day’s Inn, but they got put up at a Hilton for their convention and thought it was fabulous. Or they’re used to taking cruises so that 350-square-foot standard they stayed in was “really spacious.” Many business travel road warriors actually like predictable rooms that are the same in every city. Some people hate everything. Some are easily pleased. Some are foodies. Some think Applebees is “going out for a romantic dinner.”

Do you trust each of them to tell you which hotel is “the best in town” or is the best for you? Remember too that the hotel ranked #1 for a city in TripAdvisor is usually the one that had the highest ratio of good reviews to bad, so places that are perceived as a great value will often trump the expensive ones most reviewers can’t afford. Sure, it’ll help you see which establishments should be avoided entirely (like this Dirtiest Hotels list), but collectively treating the reviews as authoritative can be trouble. I’ve heard a lot of after-stay complaints that started with the phrase, “The TripAdvisor reviews all seemed pretty good but…”

I’ll hold the sales pitch for Luxury Latin America except to say all our reviews are written by experienced, well-regarded travel writers who have a keen eye and a wealth of experience evaluating places to stay. They’ve seen plenty of great and plenty of lousy on multiple continents and are qualified to tell the difference. When they say a hotel is the best in town, it’s because they’ve actually been to the other top ones and can make a qualified comparison. “User-generated content” is a boon for publishers who don’t want to pay any pesky writers, but often they get what they pay for.